


kindred

by simplyprologue



Series: and i can see for miles, miles, miles [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Babies, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 11:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9179566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: “I left the next-of-kin space blank on my enlistment form,” she whispers, taking the datapad from his loose grip, logging in with her own restricted access codes. Draws up her contact forms, and gives it to him to place his name.“I’d like that.”He brings up his own next.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Well. Here we are. To the surprise of no one who knows me, there's a baby in the mix eventually. Many thanks to Mira for beta'ing this and shoving me along to finish it.

They can’t stay together. Even if Rogue Squadron came back, in tatters and torn fragments and stragglers, it was never meant to be permanent. They all meant to die, and even if some of them survived, it did not mean that they could remain. They were ephemeral, and in their deaths or in this horrible _after_ they must return to their posts.

Cassian is an intelligence officer, and she is--

_No one._

At first, at least, until Mon Mothma smiles wanly at her, lips forming a tacit apology. Jyn knows she is no longer an asset, just a child soldier who has grown into a gruesome woman. She can be a weapon, a soldier. She did follow orders, once, and she has been in worse prisons than the rebel army.

So she becomes Sergeant Erso, billeted to quarters she’s certain she’ll never make regular use of, and is directed to the quartermaster and Sergeant-at-Arms and -- her head spinning, hands clasping a new uniform befitting her rank and station, a heavy blaster to keep at her side -- within a standard cycle, given marching orders to join specialist forces on Lothal under General Syndulla. Bodhi was gone before she even woke up in the medical bay. The Rebel fleet was depleted between Scarif and runs at the Death Star, and he was sent to the front lines. Chirrut remains in bacta, Baze stolid at his side, and gone in his own way. But Cassian, awaiting a third surgery on his spine, is still here.

But here is relative. _We’ll see each other again,_ she wants to say. But neither of them believe in promises, or tomorrows.

Instead, she feels her mouth form the words, “You have the security clearance. You can just look me up.”

He jerks his chin down in an abortive nod, sitting on her bed in her quarters, his crutches leaning against the footboard. She hasn’t even bothered to locate the lightswitch, dressing herself in the dark -- the only light filters in from the datapad in his lap.

Honestly, she never intended to live this long.

But she thinks he didn’t either.

“But if something happens to you?” she asks, sitting down next to him. Her mouth fills with the bitter taste of adrenaline. “Will I know? Or just read it on a list, six months later?”

Cassian regards her for a long time. Wondering what he sees in her eyes, she looks in his, but sees only a distortion of herself reflected. But she knows what she saw on Scarif, knows what future she had built for them in the minutes they waited for the horizon to come up and take them, for the boiling sea to reach them. But this is not that future, and it cannot be. No end came, and so they must fight on. But for those short minutes, she imagined a home by the sea on an aquatic planet far-flung and quiet, a babe on her hip and Cassian in her bed. A life where her feet would tread the same half acre over and over again, where the food was plentiful and came bountiful from the ocean and the field, and a laughing child ran between them and stalks of grain. A cool, blue future -- their eyes had fallen closed, foreheads touching, and the heat of the Death Star’s ray burning their skin as Scarif burned white.

Jyn swallows it down. She does not know what Cassian saw, if anything.

“I haven’t had a family in a long time,” he finally answers. “But I--”

He folds his fingers into hers.

“I left the next-of-kin space blank on my enlistment form,” she whispers, taking the datapad from his loose grip, logging in with her own restricted access codes. Draws up her contact forms, and gives it to him to place his name.

“I’d like that.”

He brings up his own next.

The only thing the galaxy has ever promised them is death. She’d like to know when Cassian Andor’s has come for him.

She borrows the datapad and edits her forms, and then hands it back him to adjust his own. Solemn now, he reaches to cup the base of her skull, bringing their foreheads back together. Jyn closes her eyes in the darkness, and feels no warmth but of Cassian’s body pushing against hers. They remain, exchanging breaths.

They remain.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The rebellion on Lothal answered more or less to Bail Organa, and after his death, less to anyone else in High Command but to Princess Leia. Jyn finds it suits her just fine, that the Princess’ appetite for high-risk acquisitions and zero sum warfare keeps her in no shortage of missions and directives. Her job is counterintelligence, and by her third month on Lothal she’s taking missions directly from General Syndulla and less often, the Princess.

Every cycle that passes that she receives no word on Cassian -- on Bodhi, on Baze, on Chirrut, but Cassian is the only one she knows for certain, that a bulletin would come down the wave for her -- is a blessing, thank the Force.

The silence keeps her boots on the ground, her hood over her face, her blaster in her hand. The Grand Admiral’s forces have tightened their grip on the system, and Jalath feels like another city about to blow. And she is here, to make it happen. The Imperial Armory is a high value target for High Command, and all they need is a little _chaos_ to make it suitable for extraction. Sliding easily into her stolen identity, she changes into the Imperial uniform she’d bought off a seamstress, paid well for her silence and to feign the uniform being ruined in the wash. The odds of the Empire paying the seamstress to betray her are nearly even -- Jyn knows this is likely her only pass at getting the access codes before her extraction.

The starched wool smells different than the uniform she’d donned to infiltrate Scarif, but the act, the passage -- it does not dent her competence, but it rankles her nerves. She misses Rogue One like a phantom limb. She cannot miss having Cassian by her side, but she wishes he were here.

She is not caught smuggling the information out, nor transmitting it over her secure comm link. It’s not even the seamstress, who betrays her. She’s changed back out of the uniform, into street clothes, but it’s hours past curfew now. Cursing wildly under her breath as Stormtroopers enclose in on her, she damns whoever stole the rota for the ward patrols. _I had another six minutes,_ she curses, relaying the codes over the comm, praying that whoever is listening doesn’t need her to repeat them.

The first blast bolt catches her in her thigh, and she falls to her knees as she engages her truncheon.

The second, through her chest.

Pain flares through her, starbursting through her limbs to her fingertips and the pads of her toes, before rushing back to strangle her heart. Under the starched uniform jacket, her mother’s necklace pulses hot, and then cold. Legs folded at the wrong angles, she lays on her back, waiting for the end to come -- vision turning white, and then dimming, she waits for a Stormtrooper to put a blast through her skull.

Instead they crush her comm under the heel of a boot, and leave her to die. The ground is hard on her back, and wet, soaking her jacket. But she closes her eyes, imagining her face buried into Cassian’s shoulder. Consciousness eludes her, and the last sensation she knows is agony as her heart threatens to beat out of her chest.

“Rebel scum.”

 

 

When he finally clears Imperial space and logs into the portal, he sees four missed alerts spanning the past ten days. Recruiting on Coruscant itself under deep cover as an obnoxiously bureaucratic naval officer -- Cassian thinks maybe two people knew how to contact him, and between the two, neither Draven nor Mothma would have. A year ago, he wouldn’t have wanted them to, no matter the circumstances.

Heart plunking into his belly, he thumbs through the messages, starved of any details.

 _ALERT: Sgt Jyn Erso, listed MIA on Lothal…_ His fingers lose feeling, numbness crawling up his palms to his wrists, his hands dead weight at his sides. _UPDATE: Sgt Jyn Erso, listed critical condition on Lothal, medevac impending…_ Dread, cold and heavy, creeps up his back. _ALERT: Sgt Jyn Erso, critical condition on Rebel Field Base 223578… UPDATE: Sgt Jyn Erso, stable on Rebel Field Base 223578._

Stable is a wide sort of word. Cassian has seen soldiers with slim odds of ever waking up again, confined to bubbling tanks of bacta be cheerily qualified as _stable_ by medical droids. Stable is a slippery word, and he can’t stop imagining Jyn with a rebreather strapped to her face, the chrono ticking down until someone with a desk job decides she’s not worth the resources. Cassian cannot count the people who have left her to die, but he will not be one of them.

He can’t stop imagining Scarif, their hands clasped so tight, and she _cannot die._ Not if he’s not there by her side, not now, not unless he’s following her right after.

This is the closest he’ll come to disobeying orders -- not asking permission.

He sits in the pilot’s seat and charts a course for the Lothal system.

 

 

Heart skittering and skipping beats, she wakes. The electrical current in her is _wrong_ and she feels sick, _again,_ at the fear of the medical droids shocking her chest again to fix the skittering and the skipping and the sideways catch and release of her heart. Isn’t she out of almosts, anyway? Jyn can count the times death has come for her on two hands, and every day cycle since Scarif is just borrowed time, her paying off her deficits of sins on the Alliance’s credit.

She would leave, were she able to stand.

Time passes in a fog, just like every moment that’s passed since Lothal, until, “Jyn? Can you hear me?”

“Quite.” Then, “Cassian?”

The legs of a chair scrape over the floor, and his face comes into view. It’s been seven months since she last saw it, and it’s a welcome view. His hands come to frame her face, calloused fingers uncertain in stroking her fringe away from her forehead. It’s the closest to comfort she’s had in over a decade, and he’s just as unpracticed in this intimacy as she is.

(They tried, on their stolen ship back to Yavin after the battle.)

“I did not -- I came as soon as I was able to return to my ship.”

“Oh.” Without her permission, her eyes close. She drags them back open. “I’m sorry, I don’t even know where you were.”

 _Gone,_ which she thinks is the important part.

“That was purposeful.”

She licks her lips, and finds them dry and cracked. “I expected as much.”

“What happened?”

“You have codeword clearance to read the debriefing,” she says, but his eyes swim with concern and the pads of his fingers burn her temples. “I was alone. I was past curfew. They didn’t ask any questions, and were rather spiteful enough to leave me to die. The Princess sent out a team to look for me, they’d heard over the -- I was relaying intel to her, when they… when they.”

Dying just wasn’t quite the same, without Cassian at her side.

“I was afraid I would come here, and you would be gone.”

“They would have notified you,” she whispers, sliding her hand out from under the medbay sheets, resting it as far as she can. It lands on his thigh. “That’s why we put each other as kin.”

“My worst fear was that I would be too late, like -- like I almost was. Could have been.” He swallows hard, but his face belies little emotion, like the thrice-damned spy he is. There are other words, that would be spoken by other people who are not them. People who don’t count their breaths like they’re marching to their deaths. “I still have nightmares, that I failed you. And I worry, even though I know I should not.”

“No one’s worried about me in a long time.”

“I have not _had_ anyone to worry about in a long time,” he says, like an apology. But Cassian Andor doesn’t apologize. “I would have come sooner.”

“Cassian--”

“I will not burden you with this, not while you are recovering.”

“Cassian, it’s alright,” she mumbles, tightening her grip on his leg. “I am going to be alright.”

They both look away. But it’s easy to lie, after ten days on a morpha drip. But there are other vows, Jyn’s fogged mind reminds her. Other vows, that only seal you unto death. That, she would be comfortable with. She no longer gets to decide whether or not she cares about Cassian, so she might as well.

His palm smoothes over the top of her head. “I missed you.”

And it’s almost absurd -- but time has meant very little.

She was with Saw for eight years, and he tossed her out onto her own. She has known Cassian for two weeks, when she puts it all together, and here he is. Sticking around, when things have gone from bad to worse to good to back to -- her chest burns. _Extensive cardiac damage, six broken ribs, soft tissue damage._

“What happens? If you get hurt?” she asks. “Is that classified, or would Draven let me know? Or is Captain Cassian Andor too important an asset to let any information slip through his fingers?” His gaze darkens, and he looks away. It’s enough of an answer.

On a soft exhale, he leans down to brush his lips against her furrowed brow.

“How much time do you have?”

“Not long. I’m to report in on Echo Base 0730 hours tomorrow morning for debrief and my next assignment. I’m off-course now, but I needed to -- all the report said was that you were stable.”

“And?”

“It wasn’t enough.”

“Oh.” She imagines it wouldn’t be, for her either. “No, it’s not.”

“We don’t have enough time.”

 _Time for what?_ But she knows. They’ll have time, when the war is won, when everything they’ve done makes sense.

“No,” she whispers, allowing a small grin to tug at the corners of her mouth. “What’s wrong with us?”

Cassian smiles down at her.

“We have hope.”

 

 

He leaves at 2100 hours for Hoth, his paperwork adjusted once more. Their decision required witnesses, and an officer to solemnize the act. But Cassian departs, leaving a wife behind to her recovery.

 _They tried,_ Jyn thinks someone might write of them, if their names are remembered at all.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Life is what happens between assignments and missions, in hours stolen from the chaos and letters left at dead drops. Love happens too, even in a life lived by fiat. It _happens_ , is what Kes Dameron tells her when she throws up the fourth morning in a row, folded in half by a row of bushes on a forest moon.

There are _reasons_ she and Cassian won’t even say _I love you,_ Jyn thinks, when the droid whirs a cheerful noise at her.

She’s pregnant.

 

 

Two cycles later, she’s recalled to the rebel fleet amassed in the Sanctuary Pipeline by Princess Leia and learns that Han Solo has been put into carbonite and requisitioned to the Hutts by Darth Vader. The princess stares at her like she should understand, and Jyn hates that if she let herself feel it -- the long absent months where there’s a security wall between her and Cassian, the new scars on his body when they finally meet up -- she would. That she might, if her mind allows her to see this _thing_ inside of her as a baby, as hers and Cassian’s child. That she might, if Cassian… if Cassian.

(A baby doesn’t want _her_ , she thinks.)

“I have been impressed by your work with the Lothal rebel cells,” the princess says. “You are being given a commission and an assignment with the objective of dismantling the Hutt control of trade in the Outer Rim.”

Jyn quirks a brow. “Secondary objective?”

The princess folds her hands together in front of her, her hard stare breaching the gulf of the tactical table glowing green between them. “Asset acquisition.”

“Understood.”

“Excellent. I am giving you the liberty of putting together a team of your own choosing. I expect a roster within the week, and preliminary reconnaissance in six.”

Princess Leia sweeps away from her position as if she was still in white robes and silken slippers, not tactical gear and overlarge boots -- a true testament to her breeding, Jyn thinks. “Princess,” she says, despite herself. “I would imagine that if -- if I were to request Captain Andor, for this team, that General Draven would summarily reject my request?”

Something in the Princess’ demeanor softens.

“I would assume that would be correct, Captain Erso.”

Knocking her knuckles against the tabletop, Jyn nods, silently coming up with a strategy of her own. The medical droid had said her hormone levels indicated she was nine weeks along, that the odds of miscarriage were still -- _if_ the pregnancy was viable, _if_ the war did not dictate her best course of motherhood would be to terminate, _if_ nothing else went wrong, then she would send an alert to Cassian.

Until then, she was seeing to getting two rabble rousers picked up from the ruins of the Jedi temple on Tython and acquiring a heavy freight pilot from Green Squadron.

 

 

With no preamble but a fleet-wide missive transmitted in the clear, Cassian finds himself shuttled onto a ship heading for where the entire fleet is amassing over Sullust. Whatever this is, it was important enough for him to see an immediate extraction from Geonosis and burning that identity. But thank the Maker, it’s been six months since he’s last seen Jyn, and he can’t bring himself to be too upset at the mission’s abandonment.

He strides into the command center to find Draven, or Mothma, anyone who can point him into a direction to be marching in.

But he find Jyn, standing at the Princess Organa’s side, datapad in her hand.

And all his thoughts stop, to be replaced by a howling silence.

Some force, _the_ Force, brings her attention away from whatever report she and the Princess are analyzing and without triangulation or searching, Jyn finds him in the crowded room. Wide eyes unblinking, she skirts her hand over the round of her stomach, hands the pad to the Princess, and walks towards him. He wraps his arms around her, hugging her as tightly to him as he can with their child between them.

“How long?” he whispers in her ear, eyes burning.

The babe makes him or herself known, kicking at him.

“I’ve a few months left,” Jyn whispers back, and when they loosen their grip on each other he is reminded how public their reunion is -- she acquaints herself with that fact at roughly the same time as he.

He looks her over, the rugged leggings, the borrowed man’s shirt tied into a tunic over the small moon hanging from her belly, the scuffed boots, a borrowed jacket hanging open. Cataloging the changes in her appearance, he is awashed by nausea, a prickling heat of illness that settles low in his gut. There are survivors of Rogue One in the room, all smiling, all laughing like this is some _joke._ What child wants _him?_ Who are they, to bring a child into this mess? He stares at her hands taking his, leading them out into a narrow passageway. The scars on their hands match, from years of shooting blaster bolts into people’s heads.

“Why didn’t you--”

She is leading him through back the entrails of the ship, through hatches and doors and he’s letting her take him, his mind boiling in something not quite like fury. He loses how many lefts and rights they’ve taken by the fifth turn.

“I did,” she grits.

Any sense of logic disassembles in his mind. It doesn’t matter if Jyn tried to make contact, it doesn’t matter that he loves this child, it doesn’t matter if she does. He knows who they are, he knows the war they’re fighting. He is not the kind of man who is blinded -- distraction is death, in his line of work, in _their_ line of work -- but he finds himself in small white quarters, being pushed down onto a narrow rack.

“I know,” she firmly says. “I _know,_ and I considered it.” Pausing, she bites her lip, face open and vulnerable and Cassian curses himself. “But I couldn’t do it.”

Taking his hand (his heart, his mind, his good sense, too) she places it on her belly. Then, she reaches up to unknot the cord around her neck, pulling out the Kyber crystal he knows is hiding under the coarse weave of her tunic. Breaths shallow, he brushes his fingers over the scars on her chest.

“It was my mother’s.” Jyn’s voice warbles.

He is defeated. “I know.”

“You may think we have nothing to give a child but -- I know how to do _something_ right. I can do what my mother did.”

“Jyn--”

And by the Force, may she never have to. He does not want to think of it, not with the babe pushing against his palm, not when he wonders if it's an elbow or a foot or a knee coming up to meet him.

Taking a shaky breath, Cassian wraps his hand around hers on the crystal.

“Why was the fleet summoned here?” he asks, bending to rest their foreheads together, even though he thinks he knows. For better or for worse, this is the end of the line. And years ago, he promised Jyn he would be with her, all the way.

Green eyes -- he catalogs them, the particular shade they are in this moment, in this lighting -- looking into his, she answers, “There is a second Death Star.”

His heart stops.

Then she says, “And the Emperor and Vader are on board.”

 

 

He is on the shuttle down to Endor with the Pathfinders. Kissing her sweetly before he left, he promises her that he would see this to the end. And after that… they would finally figure things out.

They have to, now.

 _Little mother,_ Cassian heard Baze call her, as he prepared to disembark with him on the Tydirium.  

 

 

* * *

 

 

Survival is another kind of death sentence.

But sometimes, it’s not.

 

 

Cassian is scouting the Imperial remnants on Jakku when the transmission comes into the cockpit. Bodhi wastes no time asking permission, but immediately plugs in the coordinates for _Home One_ over Coruscant. He’s not ten days late, or six months ignorant. It’s a four and a half hour jump in hyperspace, and Cassian sits white-knuckled on the controls for the duration.

He does not relax when the klaxon alerting them to their return to realspace goes off.

Leaping out of the shuttle, he makes no attempt to conceal the limp he acquired on Scarif, and makes for the medbay at a stilted run.

Jyn, red-faced and covered in a patina of sweat, sits on a bed in a faded white gown. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles, pressing a kiss to her brow. “I’m sorry.”

“I told you to go,” she says, rolling her head to one side, resting it on his shoulder. “Did Draven--?”

“I’ll retire,” he mutters. “He can court martial me. I don’t care.”

His life and his duty belong to Davits Draven no longer. The Rebellion has had him for twenty-five years, and now that fight is done. A laugh catches in Jyn’s throat, before it is choked by a grunt of pain as her body bears down. She makes little noise or complaint -- Cassian doubted she would, not after her years of training and years of suffering -- but digs her fingers into the leather of his jacket.

“Don’t leave,” she mutters.

“I’m with you all the way.”

 

 

They name him Galen. He comes into the galaxy screaming, calming only once he’s placed on Jyn’s chest. Jyn, who looks just as shocked as her son, but scoops him against her as instincts are unfettered within her.

“Oh,” she says, her mouth forming the words more than her voice. “Hello.”

Honestly, she thinks, she never intended to live this long. Sweat has plastered her hair to her face, but Cassian is kind enough to brush it away from her eyes. She would look to him, to see what he’s telling her with his eyes, but she cannot look away from their son. Snuffling, he squirms, and she puts him to her breast.

Life has taken away the words she might have for what she’s feeling. She has no idea. No one ever gave her any warning.

 

 

“When we almost died,” she starts to asks him, once she can look away from Galen.

The weary ghosts of Rogue One -- both the living and with them, the memories of the dead -- have come and gone with their blessings. Bodhi, with a blanket, Chirrut with a prayer, and Baze with steady exasperation that his husband had been right, it _was_ a boy. Then came Princess Leia and Han Solo, expecting a child of their own now. And at last, Luke Skywalker.

They three all stumbled over belated thanks, said over the sleeping infant.

Jyn brushes the back of her finger under Galen’s chin.

“On Scarif?”

Jyn looks up at him, biting her bottom lip. Her body folds over their son, like she might never stop shielding him, like he was still inside her.

“What did you see?”

A never-ending light, he thinks, the envelope of space and time. But that’s hardly the half of it. He looks at her, and then Galen, then lifts his hand to cup her cheek.

“This,” he answers. Sighing, she leans into his touch, closing her eyes for perhaps the first time in a cycle.

They’ll find a way to stay together.

The universe is a cruel and absent place, but he and Jyn are good at holding fractal pieces together, forcing the sum to be more than the whole of the parts.

“I saw this.”

Her lips form into a smile bright enough to burn a lesser man. “Me too.”

It’s a start.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! All comments and kudos are very much appreciated!


End file.
